ATF can’t trace thousands of guns that land in Mexico

In this April 2, 2012 file photo, Mexican President Felipe Calderon participates in a joint news conference with President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington. The government said Thursday that 68,000 guns recovered by Mexican authorities in the past five years have been traced back to the United States. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Mexico has asked the United States with help tracing the origin of nearly 70,000 weapons found at organized crime scenes there from 2007 to 2011 – guns it says are from the U.S., but in most cases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was not able to figure out who first purchased the weapons at U.S. gun stores, let alone who might have then passed them on to gangsters.

An ATF report released Thursday shows that in each year authorities were usually unable to figure out where the guns were first purchased. Among the possible issues: Wrong or incomplete information is given to ATF from Mexico.

And then there is the factor that there is no telling how many guns were recovered in Mexico vs. how many Mexico requests U.S. help in tracking down. One can’t help but wonder how many fancy AK-47 or AR-15 guns fresh from the U.S. end up being kept by the always underfunded law-enforcement agencies in Mexico as well as if occasionally someone is given an offer he can’t refuse – by criminals – not to share info on certain guns with the U.S.

Results of new ATF report

That means that in most instances the cooperative effort to track down who might be supplying large-caliber weapons to Mexican drug cartels went absolutely nowhere. But even the flip side is troubling. In the thousands of instances in which the agency was indeed able to track down who first purchased the guns, there is is no way it has the personnel to put in the time and shoe leather needed to know what happened next.

This is the “Cliff Notes” version of the way it supposedly works:

1. Mexico recovers a gun at an organized crime scene.

2. Information is shared from the gun, such as serial number, make, model and caliber of ammunition it fires.

3. The data go to a weapons manufacturer, which if all is correct, should know which gun store was sent the weapon so it could be sold over the counter to the public.

4. Once the ATF knows which gun dealer sold the gun, it can go to the dealer and look at a file, kept by the store, on who purchased the weapon.

5. Once it knows who purchased the weapon, ATF can try to find that person, go to their home and ask if they would be willing to discuss what happened to the gun, and how it might have ended up in Mexico. (Maybe it was stolen, maybe it was purchased for a friend or whatever story is given.)

6. The ATF can then try to trace that gun to the next person who had the hot potato and so on, and so on, and so on.

When we are talking about tens of thousands of guns, that could be way too many cases for any law-enforcement agency, let alone a smaller one such as the ATF.

Bottom line: The report shows Mexico is asking for help finding thousands of guns, and the U.S. is helping try and track down thousands of guns. Most of the guns are not successfully traced to anyone. In the cases when they are, the ATF would be swamped if it tried to check them all out.